Loot from the Aztec Empire proved too tempting to French captains of swift, handy ships which had been commissioned as privateers. Armed with official “letters of mark” to challenge Spanish depredations on the high seas they found clever ways to exceed their authority when they overhauled cumbersome, treasure-laden galleons from America.
It wasn’t too long before it was difficult to distinguish between a French privateer and a plain pirate. And Francis I, winking broadly, said he knew of no clause in Father Adam’s will which left all the new world and its riches to his cousin Charles of Spain. Whereupon the French monarch went further. He sent out a capable Florentine pilot, Giovanni da Verrazano, to discover and claim lands in America, and if possible to locate a passage to the Indian Ocean.
Verrazano, with a crew of fifty Normans in La Dauphine, made his landfall in 1524 just above Spanish Florida. He coasted northward past the entrance to Chesapeake Bay. It appears that he glimpsed the bay and identified it as the great ocean of the East reaching to China; then he sailed on to the Hudson River.
The natives encountered by the Frenchmen along the way were gentle and playful. It was spring and Verrazano’s mariners succumbed to the beauty of the Indian women who braided their hair and modestly covered their loins with soft furs. Otherwise they were quite naked. The sailors gave the aborigines toy bells, bits of paper and colored beads, and found them in turn “very liberal, for they give away what they have.”
La Dauphine left the Hudson River and continued on north, beyond Cape Cod, to lands where the natives were found to wear Arctic bear and seal skins. They were rude and truculent too, possibly as a result of having encountered white men before. These wild men exchanged their furs warily. They wanted only fishhooks, metal cutting tools and other valuable trade goods.
When Verrazano returned home all he could show, of any tangible value, were the furs he had taken in trade along the coast of America. But no one in France was more than passingly interested in pelts; there was the more immediate prospect of finding gold or reaching China.
While the French were preparing to follow up Verrazano’s coastal discoveries with an inland venture the Spaniards looked on with a jealous eye. They themselves explored northward in Verrazano’s track to make sure there was no gold or a northwest passage to Cathay there. They took furs and Indian slaves from the St. Lawrence Gulf. And they actually tried a gigantic colonizing venture in the Chesapeake Bay area. There was the chance that another Aztec Empire lay deep in the interior of those parts!
This country to the north of Tierra Florida, the Spaniards called Tierra D’Ayllon. For it was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, a justice of Santo Domingo, who had reconnoitered it and traded there for bison hides, beaver, otter and muskrat.
In 1526 Ayllon made a settlement of several hundred men, women and children at San Miquel, possibly on the James River, in the Bay of Santa Maria as the Spaniards called the Chesapeake. He brought priests, armored soldiers, black slaves and the usual instruments of torture to the Chesapeake. But probably he didn’t erect protecting palisades about his town. San Miquel was abandoned after the first winter, its captain having perished. The benighted natives had not taken well to killings. These were of a prouder race than the West Indian savages, and those colonists who did not die at their hands or from disease were happy to get back to sunny Santo Domingo.
There seemed to be no hope of finding gold or silver in Tierra D’Ayllon anyway. From this time all the closely guarded, secret maps of the Spaniards said so. Except for some further trade in the Potomac for bison hides and pelts, and a fatal missionary effort on the peninsula between the James and York Rivers by a band of brave Jesuit priests, the Spaniards ceased active interest in the Chesapeake area for many years. They were being kept much too busy in Florida and South America. Newly discovered mines, interlopers in the Caribbean, and especially French corsairs lying in wait along their rich trade routes—all demanded attention.